Because we moved a lot, I went to a lot of schools.
But I always got to them the same way.
I walked.
Except in my last couple of years of grade school.
Mostly those years I rode my bike.
In the first year at that last grade school we lived quite far from the school I was going to - a Catholic grade school - so I rode the city bus.
I also went to a Catholic high school, and it was quite distant, so I got on the city bus again.
For high school.
In high school riding a bike to school was not a thing one did if one didn’t want to be ridiculed.
Ray rode his bike and paid the price: Ridin’ Ray, everybody called him.
I ran into him years later at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha.
Like me, he had gotten a commission.
I saw him one day, recognized him and said an enthusiastic “Hi, Ray; it’s Noel, Noel McKeehan.”.
He made it clear he was not interested in striking up my acquaintance anew.
Previous ridicule is a hard thing to shake.
I said I went to high school on the bus, and that is an accurate statement.
But the statement’s accuracy probably would induce an inaccurate “therefore”.
The “therefore” being: so I/he took the bus home.
That has some truth in it.
But only some.
The bus stop where a variety of us caught the various buses that carried us to our various homes - our high school served the entire Portland metropolitan and suburbs area - had become a place of interchange and discussion - while we waited, each of us, for our designated bus.
Lotta friendships formed.
Next to sitting next to him on the floor of the first floor before the bell rang for our first class, I got to know Jack much better at that bus stop.
I never would have known Tom the poet without that bus stop.
And, it turned out, that a lot of us there at that bus stop were all from Madeleine.
We had gone to grade school together, and most of us had never gotten to know one another.
A wait at a bus stop fixes that.
One day - spring, balmy, floral scent floating - the Madeleine guys decided to walk back to our 'hood.
It wasn’t that far - probably three or four miles (iPhones were quantum future things so we would never know) so we walked back to our homes.
And we talked.
And we laughed.
And we decided that, weather being kind, we would always walk.
As fall and winter came, we just donned better weather clothes and kept walking.
Friendship is a multi-letter word and that word is what came out of those walks.
